New HP Laptop with Recovery partition

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
> But, onward and downward.  The replacement box is a brand new HP Pavilion
> dv6000t (another entertainment box... I couldn't resist)
> * 15.4" Wide-aspect LCD
> * Core Duo (Centrino)
> * Intel Wireless 394 / Bluetooth
> * NVidia GeForce Go 7400 (of course, I paid extra just for you Lonnie ;)

My paycheck thanks you.

> * VGA/S-Vidio out
> * DVD+-RW-DL
> * 12-cell battery (most important ;)
> * 3 USB / 1 FireWire
> * Media slot
> * 1 not quite PCMCIA  "ExpressCard" slot (great, so nothing I own will work
> anymore!)
> * Built-in DVD/Media viewer...
>
>
> But here's a weird part.  It comes with a great feature, a recovery partition,
> so I don't even need DVD's to recover!!
> Except that the frickin' thing is 10GB in size.  Now I realize that megs are
> cheap these days, but GIGs ain't <in the best drawl a Michigander can muster>
>
> I've already gone through the initial "Create Recovery Discs" process (3
> DVDs), and would like to free up that huge partition.  Before I do, however,
> I wanted your collective opinions here.  Anyone have experiences with this?
> Compaqs used to do their BIOS config on a separate partition and configuring
> the machine was a serious pain if you wiped it... but you could reinstall it.
>
> Should I *not* wipe it?  80GB isn't that big when you chunk out 15GB for
> windows and 10GB for the stupid recovery partition (and it's full up at like
> 9.76GB)

I'm pretty sure that recovery partition is nothing more than a means of 
recovering windoze when it ends up getting broken beyond repair.  I'm not 
aware of any modern systems that save their SBIOS configurations to a HD. 
You could boot with Knoppix (or whatever other live CD you like), and 
mount the recovery partition and see what is hiding on there.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org